"never needed defrosting more often than 2 times per year"
I used to live in a house that had an early 90's era Whirlpool refrigerator, same brand as in this house and it appears to be the same design. The 90's fridge failed to defrost and it would start to run constantly and temperatures would begin to rise after a few months where the flow was completely blocked. We ended up replacing the refrigerator after taking the cover off and defrosting it with a hairdryer multiple times because we didn't know how simple it was to troubleshoot a defrost timer at the time. The evap coils in automatic defrost refrigerators are tiny and once they frost up, it's quick to cause issues. I'm just not sure where the line is drawn for how much frost would equal efficiency loss versus defrosting after x amount of time or x amount of frost.
Usually manual defrost freezers don't matter because their racks are exposed and don't require air flow from a fan that would get blocked where it goes into the refrigerator so they can get frosted pretty heavily and still operate just fine but I don't know think its so much the case for a refrigerator designed to defrost on a regular basis.
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